Universal Declaration of Human Rights-Article 1.
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

Monday, September 12, 2005

Egyptians are Filled with Anger over the Tragic Losses

I wanted to write about this news last week, but I did not for two reasons; first I was following the elections play and second my heart was so broken by the tragic losses that I could not write. I am not so sure I also wrote here anything because I m borrowing some news and an email from a friend of mine mourning his friends he lost in the fire. I feel speechless. I feel I am out of breath to ask for accountability and why would innocents should pay their lives for corruption. But I only want one thing that everyone who reads my blog should know what we mean to the regime of Egypt. Here are two painful stories.

Last week more than 45 people died in Beni Suef governorate, among the dead people, there were children who were under the age of 10.

A total of 32 people were killed when a fire broke out in an Egyptian theater during a crowded performance last Monday, causing hundreds of audience members to flee the burning building in panic. Some were killed in the stampede when about 1,000 people were trying to get out of the theater in Beni Suef, a city on the Nile river about 60 miles south of Cairo. Survivors said that only one exit was available as the audience stampeded in panic.

At the same place, thirteen people, mostly children aged 11 or 12 on their way to work in fields, were killed last weekend when a farm tractor pulling a trailer fell into an irrigation canal.

That was an email I received from a friend of mine who said goodbye to his friends he lost in the fire.

"I have just come back from the collective memorial event held at the Egyptian academy of Arts. The disastrous incident claimed the lives some of the most prominent names in the "middle generation" of Egyptian theatre critics and artists, including: Hazem Shehata, Medhat Abu-Bakr, Ahmed Abdel-Hamid, Mohsen Moselhy, Saleh Saad, Bahaa El-Merghany, and others. Their deaths have dealt a devastating blow to an already aggrieved cultural and theatrical community.

Unfortunately, this tragedy was not a terrorist act. I say unfortunately because this would at least have made the death of those victims somewhat less absurd. For everyone I saw at the funeral, grief was hard to distinguish from resentment and anger, since the tragic event has highlighted in the most painful manner the scandalous indifference that the Egyptian State has long been showing the provinces outside Cairo and Alexandria, as the abject condition of the Beni Suef makeshift theatre and its lack of the most basic safety precautions must have demonstrated.Ironically, the event occurs only one day before the first multi-candidate presidential elections in Egypt. As it happens, our 70-something President, in office since 1981, runs for a fifth consecutive term on a platform the promises the completion of the process of progress that he claims to have initiated.

Some of the families of the victims are planning to take the Egyptian Ministry of culture to court."

I guess we can never be cheaper! My heartfelt condolences for my people, families and friends, and forgive me for not being able to say much. My heart is aching with pain.

Government officials responsible for Beni Suef inferno must be brought to justice and be held accountable.